Media’s perverse focus on heat deaths is leading to wrongheaded climate policies

Across the United States and Europe, the media is warning of dangerously high temperatures.

“Extreme Heat Is Breaking America,” warns The New York Times. “Lethal heat is Europe’s new climate reality,” adds Politico.

It’s an annual routine: Expect to be inundated with alarming stories about heat domes, heat deaths and heat waves, pointing to the urgency of climate action.

But this narrative will tell you only a misleading fraction of the story.

The impacts of heat waves are stark and immediately visible, meaning they are photogenic and coverage is click-worthy.

Heat kills within just a few days of temperatures going up, because it swiftly alters the electrolytic balance in weaker, often older people.

These deaths are tragic and often preventable, and we hear about them every summer.

But the media seldom reports on deaths from cold.

Cold kills slowly — often over months. In low temperatures, the body constricts peripheral blood vessels to conserve heat, raising blood pressure.

But deaths from cold far outnumber those from heat. The most comprehensive Lancet study shows that while heat kills nearly half a million people globally each year, cold kills more than 4.5 million — i.e., nine times more.

Yet, perversely, global media instead write nine times more stories about heat waves than cold waves.

We deserve to know which is the bigger threat.

We should know, for example, that the United States sees more than 80,000 deaths from cold each year, vastly outweighing its 8,000 heat deaths.

In Latin America and Europe, cold deaths outweigh heat deaths 4 to 1. In Africa, astonishingly, it’s 46 to 1.

Even in India — where the Western media has fixated on extreme heat this year — cold deaths outnumber those from heat 7 to 1.

Global warming indeed causes more heat waves, raising the risk that more people die of heat. However, it also reduces cold waves, leading to fewer cold deaths.

The Lancet study found that over the past two decades, higher temperatures have caused 116,000 more heat deaths annually — but 283,000 fewer cold deaths.

On balance, that’s 166,000 fewer temperature-related deaths each year.

It is a travesty that this is almost never reported.

Sure, as temperatures rise, that balance will shift. But a near-global Nature study shows total deaths from heat and cold will remain lower than today even with as much a 4.8°F temperature increase, which is near what’s expected by the end of this century.

One of the most obvious ways to keep populations cool is through cheap and effective city design: more trees and green spaces and painting black roofs and roads white to make them more reflective. 

A study of London shows white paint could reduce heat-wave temperatures by as much as 18°F.

A Nature study shows large-scale, global adoption of cool roofs and pavements would cost about $1.2 trillion over the century but will prevent climate damages worth almost 15 times as much.

The best way to reduce both heat and cold deaths is ensuring access to cheap energy. Affordable energy allows people to use air conditioning during heat waves and heating during cold snaps.

In America, heat deaths have dropped by half since 1960, largely due to air conditioning — despite more hot days.

Affordable heating, enabled by lower natural-gas prices from fracking, now saves an estimated 12,500 lives each winter.

The big problem is that climate policies prioritize reducing CO₂ emissions over energy affordability.

Policies that increase energy costs make it harder for people to afford heating and cooling, which can mean more deaths, especially among the poor and vulnerable. 

The International Energy Agency’s latest data shows a clear correlation between more solar and wind and higher average household and business energy prices.

Countries pushing net-zero climate policies and fossil-fuel taxes like Germany’s have seen energy costs soar.

Three in four Germans say they’re worried about whether they can afford the high cost of Germany going green, and nearly 60% shiver in the cold instead of turning on heat, per a survey by a Sweden-based energy group.

Though climate change is a real problem, the media’s reduction of this complex issue to sensationalist stories of heat deaths is misleading.

We need policies that prioritize human well-being, ensuring affordable energy for heating and cooling, along with adaptation.

To tackle long-term global warming we need to invest in energy innovation to make green energy cheaper and more reliable, rather than imposing costly mandates.

But the media’s focus on heat deaths will only promote harmful policies and keep us from considering more sensible solutions — both for climate change and temperature-related deaths.

Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and author of “False Alarm” and “Best Things First.”